I do get a lot of phishing emails, we all do, but as security professionals we tend to recognize them immediately. Either the syntax is wrong, or it’s missing a name. When you get them from a bank you don’t even deal with that’s a pretty good clue.

However, when the phishing is well done and targeted, the game changes. Today, I received one that was well targeted. It uses my email registered at GoDaddy and my real name. And their guess that I have too many folders is a good one as I do have many test and demo sites.

If this wasn’t bad enough, our users are also reporting that they are receiving similar targeted emails. The emails are all very well written and warn the user about a large number of directories being used on their sites and a possible suspension of their account. This is what the email looks like:

We heard reports of this type of targeted phishing a few months ago, but it seems to be picking up steam lately. Webmasters have to be extra careful not to be fooled by this. This is the full copy of the email:

Dear Valued GoDaddy Customer RealName.

Your account contains more than 5271 directories and may pose a potential performance risk to the server. Please reduce the number of directories for your account to prevent possible account deactivation.

In order to prevent your account from being locked out we recommend that you create special directory.

Or use the link below:

https://mya.godaddy.com/tmp.aspx?doit=6123455

However, when clicked (or moused over), the link actually redirects to a secondary phishing page located at httx://texlavka.ru/includes/data/ourrueatqz.htm asking for your GoDaddy user and password:

Are you a GoDaddy customer? Did you receive a similar email with your real name? If you ever need to login to your hosting provider, make sure you go straight to it and do not follow email links.

While doing an analysis of one black-hat SEO doorway on a hacked site, I noticed that it linked to many similar doorways on other websites, and all those websites were on IIS servers. When I see these patterns, I try to dig deeper and figure out what else those websites have in common. This time I revealed quite a few GoDaddy Windows servers have been pwned by “replica spam” hackers.

Let’s Dig Into Some Numbers

1,782 Domains. I collected 1,782 unique compromised domains that hackers use in this campaign. This list is just a tip of an iceberg and I’ll show why a bit later, so read on.

305 IP Addresses. Those websites are scattered across 305 unique IP addresses (actually 304, if we ignore four domains whose addresses I couldn’t resolve). This means roughly 6 websites per IP, however they are not evenly distributed and while many IPs only have one compromised site, some of the servers have hundreds of them.

Top networks:

GoDaddy: 95 hosts (31%) and 1,095 websites ( 61%. )

Brinkster: 50 hosts (16%) and 258 websites (14%)

Network Solutions: 27 hosts (9%) and 77 websites (4%)

Versaweb LLC: 5 hosts (1.6%) and 88 websites (5%)

As you can see, 84% of all websites belong to 4 networks.

Let’s look closer at servers on these networks, but before we do it I’ll show how I find compromised websites.

Cyber Monday Spam

The spam campaign I’m investigating is promoting online stores that sell cheap “replicas” of popular luxury brands like Beats by Dre, Michael Kors, Lululemon, Uggs, Juicy Couture, Moncler, Ray Ban, etc. Most of the doorways are currently optimized for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. The typical anchor text they use in their links is something like “michael kors cyber monday” or “uggs black friday“.

These spammy links point to the homepage of compromised websites, which typically have a block of hidden links at the bottom of HTML code:

If the website is vulnerable enough, hackers will install a script that generates completely new spammy pages specifically for search engines and return normal pages for human visitors — cloaking. The “human” versions of the pages have a small script at the very top of the HTML (usually before the tag) that redirects web searchers to spammy sites. It either something like this:

Detection

Any of these variants are easily detected by both Sucuri SiteCheck and Unmask Parasites, so it’s not a problem to check websites and tell whether they are infected or not.

Now that we know how to detect the infection, let’s just test random websites on some of the IPs that have many infected websites (based on my doorway analysis).

For example, let’s take 184.168.152.150 (where I found 25 doorways) and use the Bing’s “ip:” search operator along with the “cyber monday” keyword to find websites on that server: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ip%3A184.168.152.150+cyber+monday. Now you can scan websites for results that point to home pages (/ or index.html). More than 70% of the websites I checked are still infected (the rest either won’t load or have been cleaned already).

Bing Cyber Monday Results

Compromised Servers

This simple Bing search revealed hundreds of infected websites on that server. I observed the same results for 49 out of 95 GoDaddy servers from my list.

Those 49 servers are shared Windows servers with thousands of sites. For example, Domaintools.com says 2,050 sites use the 184.168.152.150 address. The websites I checked belong to different users so it’s not just a matter of individual compromised accounts. And the websites are quite heterogeneous – ASP, PHP, pure HTML, etc. so it doesn’t look like a common web application vulnerability either. It looks like those servers have been pwned by hackers who now have access to most user accounts there. Given that we have almost 50 known such Windows servers on the GoDaddy network, this may mean some infrastructure level problems or at least common Windows server security configuration issues.

The rest of the servers typically have one or very few websites (I suppose either dedicated servers or IPs) so they don’t affect this hypothesis.

Some of the Brinkster and Versaweb servers also have this issue:
65.182.100.172
65.182.100.177
65.182.100.186
65.182.100.191
65.182.100.88
65.182.101.106
65.182.101.150
65.182.101.152
65.182.101.206
65.182.101.207
65.182.101.41
65.182.101.60

It’s still not clear why all websites on those servers have not been infected (or have they been cleaned already?). Maybe hackers infected them semi-manually, so just a few hundred infected websites was good enough for them?

When checking random websites on the compromised servers I noticed that some of them used very old versions of CMS’s (e.g. 4 year old WordPress). Maybe such websites were the penetration points that helped hackers compromise the whole servers later?

I also know that hackers install PHP wrapper scripts on pure HTML sites. For example, it’s typical to see a default.php working instead of index.html when you request a homepage. This wrapper script explains why you see the injected script at the very top of the HTML code and how hackers manage to implement “cloaking” on pure HTML sites.

At this point, I can only see the following things in common on the servers used in this spam campaign:

Windows

IIS (usually an old version)

PHP support

I wonder if this combination has a known security hole that allows to pwn server?

To Webmasters

This time I’d like to reach out to webmasters who host their websites on shared Windows servers. Especially to GoDaddy clients.

Then check search results for your website on Google (the “site:” operator), where you should look for unexpected keywords in your page titles and descriptions. Make sure to check “cached” copies that Google store for your site. Then add the following keywords to your “site:” search that may help your spot more web spam:

site:yourdomain.com cheap

site:yourdomain.com buy online

site:yourdomain.com “cyber monday”

site:yourdomain.com “black friday”

site:yourdomain.com outlet

Then you might want to figure out if your server looks compromised. First, identify your website’s IP address. You can use commands like ping or host, you can enter your domain name on a website like whois.domaintools.com, or you can at least ask your hosting provider. With your IP, you can then use the Bing‘s “ip:” search along with some spammy keywords.

We work in a business in which it is always chaos. In most situations the client is often distraught, vulnerable, and is plagued with this feeling of being out of control. It is the business of web malware cleanup. The last thing any website owner wants is to delay the cleanup process because of silly things that could have been easily prevented.

In our mind, there are three things you must know before engaging with any web malware company:

Know Your Host

Know How to Access Your Server

Have a Backup

As simple as they may appear, they still remain allusive to many.Read More

We are seeing many sites hosted on GoDaddy shared servers getting compromised today (and for the last few days) with a conditional redirection to sokoloperkovuskeci.com. This is what it looks like on our scanner:

We posted a few weeks ago about a database injection attack that infected thousands of WordPress blogs on shared hosts. At that time, the attackers were inserting a javascript link pointing to welcometotheglobalisnet.com/js.php?kk=25 in all the posts in the database.

Today, we started to detect that a large number of those sites are being reinfected (and a bunch of new ones are getting hacked too) with a very similar malware string. The major difference is this time the links are pointing to http://lessthenaminutehandle.com/js.php?kk=33 (both hosted at 91.193.194.110).

This hack also injects the malware on every post in the database, but this time encoded as:

It seems that after a few months quiet, the “Hilary Kneber” group is back at it again. Their latest approach is very typical of Hilary Kneber style attacks affecting GoDaddy shared hosts. Basically they modify every PHP file and the database to make sure every page in the infected site is loading malware.

Today, we’ve started to see various WordPress sites infected with the following malware:

Update 1: We are seeing some Vbulletin forums with the database infected. So it is not restricted to WordPress.Update 2: If you need help cleaning up your site, we can do it for you: http://sucuri.net/signup

Which infects every post in the WordPress database and also modifies all PHP files to generate the above code. Note that the domain is not blacklisted yet so the risk is very high for everyone visiting an infected site.

What happens when someone clicks an infected site?

What the malware does is very simple, it contacts a few domains:Read More

For the last few days we’ve tracking another large scale attack against GoDaddy shared-hosted sites. GoDaddy has been a target for a while, with mass infections happening often.

This time, the attackers changed tactics and instead of infecting the PHP files, they injected malicious code inside the database. On the WordPress infected sites, they added the following javascript inside every post (on the wp_posts table):

UPDATE: As of 4AM Pacific, on November 3rd, we’ve received various reports of another related outbreak of exploited sites on GoDaddy. We’re currently researching the issue and will provide updated scripts if necessary. Please comment below if you have been affected, or if you have any information on the exploit.

We posted a few days ago that attackers were using insomniaboldinfocom.com to spread malware to multiple web sites. Today, they changed domains and are targeting GoDaddy sites using insomniaboldinfoorg.com.

The following domains/IP addresses are being used to spread the attack:

As you saw over the last few days, various sites at GoDaddy were exploited causing lots of complaints on Twitter and in other places about GoDaddy security.

Well, today, many of those sites were reinfected (again) and GoDaddy tried to fix the them automatically. However, their scripts failed for some reason, leaving some sites with empty lines at the top of the PHP files, causing these errors to show up:

We can now confirm there is an undetermined number of sites hosted at GoDaddy that have been attacked and exploited. Our research is showing this is an ongoing issue that started within the last couple hours.

All the sites we’ve seen so far contain the following javascript added to all PHP files: